Hyderabad, August 10: As a queasy feeling grips the Congress that mid-term elections might take place in the event of Jagan Mohan Reddy walking away from the party with his MLAs, Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) chief K Chandrasekhara Rao on Monday cautioned his party colleagues and workers to be prepared for sudden polls.
Interacting with Medak MP Vijayashanthi and the newly-elected MLAs and constituency and district in-charges of the party at the State committee meeting here, the TRS supremo said: “It looks mid-term elections are certain. It is a matter of time when the government will fall. Even the chief minister is not so sure,” Chandrasekhara Rao is reported to have said.
He wanted them to get cracking and strengthen the party from grass-root level and engineer defections from the Telugu Desam Party. “Admit workers and cadres of other parties liberally into our party. This is the only way to strengthen our base,” Chandrasekhara Rao is reported to have said. The State committee adopted 10 resolutions, including one related to the demand for dismissal of the 16 Andhra and Rayalaseema ministers for calling Telangana statehood demand seditious.
Earlier, at the inaugural, the TRS chief said that the byelections had lent support to the demand for separate statehood and it had now assumed Himalayan proportions. Ahead of the Srikrishna Committee completing its work on December 31, the TRS would organise a mammoth public meeting with students in Warangal to bring pressure on the panel to recommend creation of a separate State. “The public meeting will be on a scale not witnessed before. At least 10 lakh students will take part in it,” Chandrasekhara Rao said.
The TRS chief took the ministers of Andhra region to task for saying that the demand for Telangana was seditious in nature. “They are acting irresponsibly. The demand for their sack came from the people of Telangana because they felt very hurt,” he said, insisting that the ministers should tender an unconditional apology to the people of the region. He took exception to Chandrababu Naidu’s ambivalent stand on Telangana. “He put forth his two-eye theory before the Telangana people in the byelections but the people opened their third eye, destroying the TDP for good,” he said.
–Agencies